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February 08, 2008
Fresh Cargo Ship Arrives at Space Station
Maybe it's just the mood after two feet of snow (beautiful, quieting, shutting everything down for a day) on top of as much snow as we usually have in a winter ...
or maybe the lack of sleep waiting for the news that finally came at 5:30 a.m. that my son Aaron Ximm (http://www.quietamerican.org/) (see the Quiet American web site for found sound and one minute vacations) and his wife Bronwyn have their first baby, a beautiful girl, 9 pounds 5 oz ...
but when I saw this headline in the list of space stories of the day, it flashed me back to a short time ago, only a few decades ago, when seeing this headline
Fresh Cargo Ship Arrives at Space Station
would have meant I was reading Willie Ley (does anyone remember that name?) or science fiction.
And I thought, what headlines a few decades hence will hit us the same way? what will be commonplace, then?
today, it’s a plume of water jetting from Enceladus or a picture of a methane sea on Titan or more detail on the map of Mars ... my bet is that then we’ll be out of the solar system, earth-like planets will be known in significant numbers, we'll have outposts on the moon, Mars, a space station at a Lagrange point. another in the asteroid belt (it’s the high ground for military watchfulness, a new frontier for mining) ...
and the Cantina scene in the first Star Wars film will seem like a cartoon but a cartoon that illustrates a real multi-species society ... because we will have allowed ourselves to accept a more humble place in a universe teeming with life ...
Posted by Thieme at February 8, 2008 02:57 AM
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